Browsed byTag: Philosophy

In 2007, Colin Wilson wrote an article for Philosophy Now called, Whitehead as Existentialist. According to Wilson, Alfred North Whitehead was an existentialist. Even if his philosophy is not blatantly existentialist, like Nietzsche’s or Kierkegaard’s, I can understand why Wilson would think so, although what we usually think of as an existentialist is someone like Sartre or Camus, the most famous existentialists. The problem is, however, Sartre and Camus ended up believing that one is helpless against the chaos of…

My heroes are not the typical ones, the movie stars, sports stars, musical stars, et al. Rather, they are philosophers, writers, poets, thinkers who can all be grouped under the rubric of Outsider, to borrow from Colin Wilson. My heroes are all Outsiders. People such as Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Goethe, and more recently Sylvia Plath, James Hillman, Colin Wilson, and Gary Lachman. These are the kinds of individuals I respect and admire most. No, they are not sports heroes, racing…

Wilson now turns to Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), perhaps the greatest intellectual of his era. Time will tell if he will be recognized as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century. The sublimity of his thought is unsurpassed for his day and time. The only one that comes close, perhaps, is C.G. Jung. Wilson has a high regard for Whitehead, mostly because Whitehead began his career as the “typical abstract philosopher.” He “gradually rejected ‘abstractionism’ until he became one…

Finally, we have arrived at the last chapter of this book. It’s been a long road. I have learned much from Colin Wilson. He has been a great inspiration to me this year. Even though he has passed from this world, the spirit of his work lives on in his over one hundred books. The Outsider and Religion and the Rebel have been outstanding studies for me. I have branched out from mainly doing articles on depth psychology to…

I began reading Søren Kierkegaard around 1990. I was part of the online community called GEnie back then, GE’s answer to Compuserve. We had a good group of thinkers there and we discussed philosophy and religion constantly. I had just recovered from two very painful back surgeries; I was on disability at the time, so I had plenty of time to read and write online. This is really where I fell in love with philosophy, and ultimately where I discovered…

We have grown weary of the man that thinks. He thinks and it is not true. The man below Imagines and it is true, as if he thought By imagining, anti-logician, quick, With a logic of transforming certitudes. -Wallace Stevens, Sombre Figuration I have come to realize, after all my years of studying philosophy and psychology, that my own personal gnoseology must be one I am calling “metaphorics.” I name it this to accentuate the primary use of metaphorical thinking…

Bruno desired to place truth into the hands of the human race. He may not have completely seen the ramifications of an acentric universe, that this would lead humanity to question its own self-worth in the face of nihilism. Humanity believed it dwelt in the center of God’s universe. After Bruno, this delusion was banished. Humanity lived on a planet that was just another speck in a vast, infinite ocean of other specks. Eventually, this truth, among others, would lead…

Bruno was one who fully utilized the imagination in his work. It took him a mere ten years of traversing the imaginal world to reach a more accurate picture of the universe than Galileo’s, who spent several decades calculating and experimenting. Even after those many years, when Galileo was ready to die, he still believed the Sun to be the center of the universe. Bruno accurately saw the universe to be without a center almost sixty years prior to this….

We hear much about Bruno’s contributions to cosmology, especially in the first episode of the new Cosmos series, starring host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Indeed, his cosmological ideas were revolutionary and amazingly prescient, but his primary contributions to humanity were philosophical and ontological, as we will see. I believe his theory of matter is most important. It influences all his other accomplishments. Bruno formulated the most impressive theory of matter of any post-medieval European philosopher, perhaps to this day. Using only his…

Giordano Bruno had his eyes steadfastly fixed on the future of mankind. He desired more than anything that humanity be led out of the despotic morass of the Christian religion, with its chains of hierarchy, intolerance, dogmatism, and downright tyranny. Not only that, but he wanted to provide all peoples of all nations and religions an intellectual and spiritual infrastructure that they could wholeheartedly accept without reservation. The overthrow of Ptolemaic geocentrism was paramount in order to seriously weaken the…